Friday, December 26, 2008

This is a great resource: a website for learning Indo-European languages. I’ve already started looking at some of the courses offered there and I can imagine I’ll spend more time on the site in the future.

Monday, December 22, 2008

In the last post, I mentioned Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction. She includes some analysis of translation metaphors, which is a topic I am interested in. She writes that studying metaphors translators use about their work is an important part of translation studies today. Here are some of the ones Professor Bassnett mentions:

“[C]lusters of metaphors used by translators reflect their thinking about the role and status of translation in their own time. Predictable metaphors relating to rhetoric in general include following in footsteps, changing clothing, discovering treasure or alchemical transfer, and these metaphors also show a certain degree of ambiguity towards the source text, with the status of the text in its source system being significant in determining the attitude and strategies of the translator as well as the right of the target culture to possess it.” (146)

The translator as a servant was a popular metaphor through 19th century. (147)

Augusto de Campos uses the metaphor of the transfusion of blood. “Translation is for him a physical process, it is a devouring of the source text, a transmutation process, an act of vampirization.” (155)

“The images of translation as cannibalism, as vampirism, whereby the translator sucks out the blood of the source text to strengthen the target text, as transfusion of blood that endows the receiver with new life, can all be seen as radical metaphors that spring from post-modernist post-colonial translation theory.” (155)

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

I was reading Susan Bassnett’s Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction and noticed that her chapter on translation studies is a good basic introduction to the field, though it focuses primarily on recent times and trends. She argues that “[c]omparative literature as a discipline has had its day…We should look upon translation studies as the principal discipline from now on, with comparative literature as a valued but subsidiary subject area.” (161) What do you think about that?

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

You can read or watch the Nobel lecture by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, online. There is also a lot of other interesting material on the Nobel Prize website.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

I've long kept a list of blogs on this site, but I thought I'd call your attention to it now, as the days are getting darker and people just want to stay inside with a warm drink and some good reading material. This is not a complete list, of course, just a few of my favorite, frequently updated blogs on translation and language.

About Me

Originally from Chicago, I lived in southern Sweden for nearly 5.5 years, and moved to southern Wales in September 2006. I completed a Ph.D. translation studies in June 2009 at Swansea University, with a dissertation on the translation of children's literature.
Now I live in Norwich, England, where I am a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, and I also work as a translator, writer, and editor.
Contact me at bravenewwords (AT) gmail (DOT) com.